No word yet on what the punishments are actually going to be, but based on Iranian legal precedents it’s not looking good.The system is so religiously conservative that, if accused of multiple extramarital affairs, a person can be stoned to death.Each contains its own section of I spent two nights online with an Iranian friend, going over these websites in some detail, concentrating on the main, Farsi pages but with some attention to the English sections as well.

Even the chat rooms require permission from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

It means any interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence issued by a qualified scholar, usually in response to a believer’s question.

Twelver Shi’ism — the branch of Shi’ism that derives legitimacy from a line of twelve imams who succeeded the Prophet, and is the prevailing faith in Iran — has a much more defined and rigorous clerical hierarchy than almost any other strain of Islam.

This started four days ago, cropping up all over Twitter in that mushroomy fashion, as if it had rained.

The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, had used “his own website” to issue a fatwa barring men and women from chatting together online, “given the immorality that often applies to this.” The story got retweeted by real human rights activists, like Suzanne Nossel, head of the PEN American Center: And by fake ones, like Ben Weinthal, paid to propagandize for an Iran war by the so-called Foundation for Defense of Democracies: Robert Spencer, the highly profit-making one-man Islamophobic road show, seized on it: And for some reason, the story seems to have been a big hit in Indonesia, where perhaps it allowed believers in a notoriously syncretic Islam to laugh at those crazy Iranians: Here’s my question, though: can be about anything.